


happiness land

by statusquo_ergo



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29004738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: We all fit into this cosmic design, one way or another.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Sokka & Suki (Avatar), Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 55





	happiness land

**Author's Note:**

> Disregards political canon established in _Legend of Korra_ , e.g., Zuko refusing to give the colonies back to Kuei.

When Sokka is a little boy, idealistic and naïve in the ways of the world, he dreams about the fantastic sorts of circumstances that might someday lead him to his soulmate. It’ll be someone from the Northern Water Tribe, probably; there’s no one he doesn’t know in his own village, no one around who he’s never met. No one whose smile might give him that tingly butterfly sort of feeling they talk about in fairy tales, no one whose eyes might meet his on a moonlit night and spark a revelation in his heart that brings the world into focus and makes all the stars line up just right. He’ll travel when he’s older, he decides, he’ll travel to the North and meet everyone from their sister tribe, and he’ll find his soulmate, and he’ll understand what all the fuss is about.

When Sokka is nine, the Fire Nation invades his village and kills his mother and leaves the way they came. Then his father leads the men of their tribe off to war and tells him to stay behind and look after things at home, and Sokka won’t travel to the North, he decides, not when there’s so much to be done at home. Not when there are so many people here who need someone to protect them, not when he’s the only one left who can.

When Sokka is ten, long after existing on the periphery of war has become a way of life, he thinks it might be nice to meet his soulmate someday, somehow, but it’ll probably never happen, and that’s okay, too. The fairy tales and the legends and all that are nice stories to hear, nostalgic words to trade around the fire in the dead of night or under the blazing sun, but somebody’s got to be practical about things. Katara can still believe in soulmates if she wants, she can still believe that she’ll find hers someday, and he won’t try to tell her otherwise. He’s not a monster.

Somebody has to know better, is all.

\---

When Sokka is fifteen, his sister Katara accidentally frees the Avatar from his icy stasis, putting their sorry little village directly in the sights of the Fire Nation prince, and it turns out that the best way to help the people who need him, who need his protection, is to flee, to travel to the North, in fact, and these aren’t anything like the miraculous circumstances Sokka imagined when he was a child, but maybe the universe knows what it’s doing after all.

In a sense, they’re still little boys and girls, flying around the world on the back of a giant bison, pausing along the way for little adventures here and there. It’s at the Southern Air Temple that Aang learns about the Fire Nation’s decimation of his people, the revelation of a history so longstanding that Sokka and Katara have never before given a thought to what life might have been like back then, when their culture was a thriving one and they were as much a part of the universe as their absence is now. It’s at Kyoshi Island that they draw enough fire to destroy an innocent village, a dark reminder that this adventure they’re on isn’t a game, that they’re not going to win every battle they fight but that’s no reason not to try.

In countless other places, they meet countless other people, learning countless other things and growing too quickly from little boys and girls into an indefinite space between childhood and adulthood, too far from the lives they left behind to ever go back but not yet grown enough for where they’re going, for what they’re being asked to do. Every day, they put their armor on and do their best to keep their hearts light, telling stories and jokes and saying silly things when it gets too quiet, when the weight of the world on their backs gets too heavy, and they hold each other close at night, and the North Pole draws nearer all the time until it’s there underneath their feet, and the world moves into yet another reality, another shift to their sense of purpose.

The Princess of the Northern Water Tribe is a lovely and beautiful girl named Yue who makes Sokka’s face flush and his words get all tangled up in his mouth, and he falls into a canal trying to invite her on a date, and she laughs a very pretty laugh and accepts, and he thinks that this is probably what finding his soulmate feels like.

Then Admiral Zhao kills the Moon Spirit, Tui, and Yue doesn’t hesitate to do the good and noble thing, her duty as the leader of her people, and sacrifice herself to bring it back. And it makes his heart hurt, and he cries for having lost her, but Sokka doesn’t feel like he’s been broken in two, and he doesn’t feel that darkness deep inside of him that all the fairy tales talk about, like nothing will ever be okay ever again, and maybe they weren’t soulmates after all. Maybe she was just a wonderful, amazing person, and he’s glad to have known her.

In a poetic sort of way, Admiral Zhao is killed in the very battle he incites, and Yue’s father Chief Arnook takes Sokka aside to confide in him that he always knew she would die this way, that this was how things had to turn out. Maybe he’s always been waiting for it, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

“You must be proud,” Sokka says.

“So proud,” Arnook says in a brittle voice. “And sad.”

Sokka looks up into the sky and does his best to put his grief away somewhere quiet.

\---

Aang finds an earthbending teacher in a blind girl named Toph Beifong who gets them kidnapped by bounty hunters and joins their trio by running away from home and lying about it, and Sokka supposes he’s not in much position to judge her decisions. Life happens in all sorts of different ways, putting the puzzle pieces together one at a time without much adherence to their arbitrary declarations of which ones are right or wrong. These things seem to happen for the best, anyway; maybe that’s something that happens to the Avatar, that life works out the way it’s meant to. Sokka doesn’t much believe in destiny or any of that, no matter how much people try to tell him he should, but if anyone is going to play by a different set of rules, it might as well be the bridge between the worlds.

Toph doesn’t seem to care much for destiny, either, and they get along just fine.

\---

They almost die in the middle of a desert, the four of them. It would be anticlimactic, Sokka thinks, for things to end that way; after all they’ve been through in so little time, all they still have yet to do, no one would find it satisfying. The stories about them would become cautionary tales; satire and sarcasm, a glitch in the timeline of humanity instead of a delineation between Before and After, the dawning of a new era that they’re supposed to be. That the Avatar is supposed to be.

They don’t, in the end. Die, that is. No, they find their way to a waterfall instead, a place where water splashes up on the shore and Sokka jerks his maps away from the spray as Katara and Aang fling waves back and forth between them. The water moves easily, their movements mirroring one another even as the tenor of it ebbs and flows; they’re probably soulmates, Sokka thinks, the Avatar and his sister. The way she steps into danger when he loses control, the way he sets her safety and her happiness above his own; he wonders if they know it yet, if there’s some sign they see that he’s missing. Maybe he’ll ask her about it one of these days.

It’s nice, the way things line up. The way things happen. It’s good. They deserve that sort of light in their lives.

Sokka looks down at his map.

There’ll be more when they get to the end of this story.

\---

It’s not long after that, trying to sneak and lie their way into the Impenetrable City, Ba Sing Se, that Suki, a girl from Kyoshi Island who he adored for a moment but never imagined he’d see again for the rest of his life, kisses him when they reunite at the ferry terminal. She teases them and she scares them a little, and then she kisses him, and he throws his arms around her as everything is forgiven in an instant. He’s surprised to see her again, surprised in that disbelieving way that people in the middle of a war make friends who they quietly expect to die, the way they build up balustrades around their hearts that aren’t meant to last, that crack and fracture at the worst of times.

“Sokka,” she says with a wide smile on her face, “it’s good to see you!”

“You too!” he says, pulling her close again and thinking of how funny it is that this happened, what an odd coincidence that two people from such different worlds who knew each other for such a fleeting time should meet up again under the unlikeliest of circumstances, almost like the universe is throwing them together on purpose. Almost like they were always meant to be, like his heart will always beat harder for her, like he’ll always be devoted to her for everything she’s done for him, everything she’s shown him that he never knew.

Later, at the Serpent’s Pass, he fears for her life and tries to box her in and she says no, she says “I can take care of myself,” and he knows she can, he knows she’s right, but he can’t tell her why he won’t let go, why he can’t open those wounds again. That part of his heart isn’t for her.

Maybe it will be, though. Maybe someday. Maybe the best relationships take time, maybe even soulmates have to start from zero and build something out of all that nothing. Maybe he just needs to give her a chance. Give them a chance. Maybe this is what’s been missing all along, the start of something real.

Then she tells him she has to go back to the Kyoshi Warriors, back to her people, and he kisses her, because it might hold them together a little while longer, it might show her how hard he wants to try. It might give her something to remember him by, for as long as they have.

She kisses him back, and he wishes things were different. He wishes they had more time.

Wishing never made it so.

\---

Sokka doesn’t know why he expected the Fire Nation to be different.

It would make sense, wouldn’t it? For everything here to be like it is in Ba Sing Se, where the war is never spoken of and the people don’t know anything of life outside the city walls, or at least they pretend they don’t. It would make sense that there aren’t more insurrectionists if that was the way things are, if he could blame their ignorance, their isolation.

Sokka doesn’t know what he expected.

In Jang Hui, young children with poorly-healed burns seared across their malnourished bodies sit with their feet dangling in the water and beg scraps of food and spare change they won’t receive from anyone who passes by, performance art for unlucky tourists stumbling through on their way to somewhere better. Adults hack and cough into buckets of three-headed fish that they tell each other are surely safe to eat, to feed to their families, that blood surely isn’t mine, don’t worry about a thing. Katara finds the factory polluting the water and destroys it, and she and Aang help the villagers clean up the filth, and they leave hailed as heroes as Sokka assures himself that the Fire Nation won’t be back, won’t replace everything they tried to fix and make these people’s lives hell all over again and a hundred times more.

In Shu Jing, they eat lunch at an outdoor market in the shadows of lush mountainsides and extravagant mansions, and Sokka rummages through a shop full of weapons and armor and shiny things to chase away the creeping knowledge of his own uselessness.

Then the Day of Black Sun arrives, and they stomp down on all their uncertainties to tell each other that they’re perfectly well prepared. After all, they have every advantage stacked in their favor: Allies, battle plans, the element of surprise. Adrenaline blocks out their fears, confidence in the rightness of their cause shutting out the possibility of failure, and they’re ready. They’re ready.

In the end, they have everything they need but time.

These things happen, on the front lines.

\---

It hits when they’re at their most vulnerable, the way these things often do. Down on their luck, down on themselves; that’s when Zuko shows up, trying to make amends. Apologizing for his actions, for all the terrible things he’s done, as though a new haircut means he’s a whole new man on the inside, too.

The universe has a pretty sick sense of humor.

“I know you must be surprised to see me here,” Zuko says, as though he’s so unpredictable, as though anything he does could surprise them after all this time.

“Not really,” Sokka says coldly, “since you’ve followed us all over the world.”

It was only a matter of time before this happened, maybe, but did it have to be here? Did it have to be now?

Where would you have preferred, then? What might have been a better place? A better time?

The universe works out the way it wants, and they’re all just along for the ride.

They refuse him, of course. How could they not? After all the things he’s done, the danger he represents, every awful thing he stands for, what other choice do they have?

He finds his way back to them, of course. What other choice does he have? Do any of them? The Avatar needs his firebending master to fulfill his destiny and defeat the Fire Lord, and Zuko, well, he knows that as well as anyone. Maybe better. They’re all just cogs in the machine, pieces of the puzzle; he’s just doing his part as best he can. What did they think was going to happen, really? In the end, how else was this going to turn out?

“You understand how easy it is to hurt the people you love,” Aang says.

Does he?

Maybe so. Maybe, after everything he’s been through, whatever that is.

Has he seen the things they’ve seen? When he followed them all across the world, to every port, every island and every city, did he bother to look? The sickness and the death, did he even notice? Does he understand how easy it is to hurt people who have their own lives and loves and dreams and destinies that have nothing to do with him, people who he doesn’t even know?

“What do you guys think?” Aang asks.

Zuko looks pleadingly for their acceptance. For their forgiveness. For their understanding that this is terrible, but it’s the way things have to be.

Toph smiles delightedly at the massive joke their lives have become. “Go ahead and let him join,” she says.

Remember why we’re here.

Sokka shrugs off all his fears, all his concerns and his better instincts. “All I want is to defeat the Fire Lord,” he says.

Remember where we’re going.

Katara glares at him, holding on to her grudges the way she has every right to, the way they all could be doing, if they wanted, even though she knows they’re out of options. “I’ll go along with whatever you think is right,” she says.

Remember how far we’ve come.

\---

Everything moves so much faster these days.

Zuko does his best to prove himself. To prove that they should trust him, that they can and it won’t hurt. He takes Aang to visit the dragons at the Sun Warrior ruins to find the heart and soul of firebending, the spirit and the meaning of it, and for the first time in a long time, it feels like maybe everything is going to be all right. Maybe their failures won’t define them, maybe they haven’t ruined everything, maybe Aang really can still save the world.

But Aang forgives easily and with his whole heart, and Sokka and Katara have too much weight on their backs, and they’ve lived in this world for too long to do the same. And Zuko, so accustomed to being unforgiven, Zuko understands, so when Sokka takes the first step, he does his best to give him everything, to do all that he can to help.

“When the invasion plan failed,” Sokka says, “some of our troops were taken. My dad, he was captured too, and I… I need to know what I put him through.”

When everything blew up in our faces. When I did the best I could and it wasn’t enough. The mistakes I made, I need to fix them. The people we lost, the lives we sacrificed, I need to know it wasn’t all for nothing. I need to know that this is a wrong I can make right.

Zuko understands.

“The Boiling Rock,” he says. “The highest security prison in the Fire Nation, on an island in the middle of a boiling lake.”

Sokka lowers his gaze to the ground as his fists quiver at his sides.

“You’ll never get in there alone.”

He smirks, and his fists stop shaking as he tightens them even more.

“I have to.”

You know how it is. You know where I am, you’ve been here too.

Zuko looks over his shoulder at the others, sitting together by the fountain. They’re probably talking about him. Arguing about him. Trying to decide what to do, trying to convince each other that they know what’s best, that they know better, somehow.

“We’ll take my war balloon.”

Sokka looks him in the eye, and Zuko looks back.

When you said you accepted me, when you said you’d take me as I am, did you mean it? Did you mean what you said?

Sokka smiles.

“Thanks, Zuko.”

Zuko nods.

I’ve got you.

\---

It’s not long before they’re separated, the two of them in the middle of this cage. They should have seen it coming, they should have been prepared; Sokka isn’t used to this kind of subterfuge. Even after all this time, the art of war is split up into parts he hasn’t mastered quite yet. Well, it hasn’t been that long, now, has it?

Zuko, though. Zuko knows what he’s doing.

“Listen,” he says when they accidentally meet up again. “I asked around the lounge. There are no Water Tribe prisoners.”

At least you tried your best.

Sokka looks at him with his pained eyes, biting back his frustration, his screams and his tears. They’ve come so far, they’re _so close,_ doesn’t that count for something? For anything?

“Are you sure?” he asks, even though he knows the answer.

“Yeah,” Zuko says. “I’m sure.”

I know. I know you are.

Sokka bangs his fist against the wall anyway, lowering his gaze shamefacedly. All those prisoners down there and not one of them, not _one_ of them the one he’s looking for. Not one of them even close.

But there—right in the middle of the yard, all alone, dour and dejected and lost and lonely but there all the same—

“Suki!”

Zuko looks over the rail at the prisoners, warm bodies in canvas bags, knotted up with string, as Sokka grins wide and takes a step back.

“Maybe we haven’t failed after all,” he says.

The universe and its silly tricks.

\---

Sokka remembers when he was a child, and he thought the universe had a plan for him. For all of them. He was ready to hand himself over to it, the way they all try to, the way they all expect to be able to do. He remembers being pitched headfirst into a war it turns out he knew nothing about, and he tries to remember that idealism, but it’s hard, there in the thick of it. It’s hard to remember the good things in the world, the possibilities of what might be if they can hang on just a little longer.

Then days like these come along, and it gets a little easier.

His father does appear in the end, stepping off the gondola and spitting in the warden’s face and standing his ground, and in an instant, everything they’ve done is worth it. All the sweat and tears, the blood and bruises, the doubt and uncertainty, all of it. No one’s ever made it out before, no one’s ever broken away, but they do, and then he has his father back, and Suki, who swears she never gave up on him as he struggles not to tell her she probably should have.

They work hard, all of them, preparing for the deadline suddenly just over the horizon, no longer months away but next week, the day after tomorrow, just a few hours left to go. All the allies they’ve gathered over their travels seem to appear out of nowhere, converging at this point in space and time for a purpose much greater than any one of them on their own, banding together across every conceivable line—benders, non-benders, Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, all of them, keeping each other busy while Aang fights the Fire Lord. Sokka holds tight to Suki and tries not to think about what might happen if he loses her because he won’t, and this night will end and they’ll be all right, they’ll all be all right.

Of course they are.

Not everyone is so lucky, but that’s just how things happen, on the front lines. But they’re all right. They make it to the light at the beginning of a new day. Sokka limps along on his broken leg and commiserates with Zuko over the scar on his chest from where his sister tried to kill him as they marvel that they’re the only ones who were hurt in any serious sort of way.

Better things turned out like this, in the end.

\---

Things don’t happen the way they expect, after that. After the final battle, after the Fire Lord’s defeat, the fall of the Phoenix King, the world doesn’t fall back into alignment, it doesn’t balance itself out with the rising sun. Sure, Zuko takes the throne as everyone expected he would, and Aang takes his place as a symbol of peace throughout the four nations, and Sokka and Katara and Toph slide into quasi-governmental roles designed to help craft the new shape of society, recovering in the aftermath, and Suki becomes one of Zuko’s personal guards, partly on account of all the disgruntled Fire Nation citizens who seem to have decided to kill him. All of those things happen.

But then there’s all the rest of it.

Too many people were born into this war. Too many people grew up knowing it as a way of life, as the _only_ way of life, and change is a terrifying thing even for those who would welcome it under better circumstances.

“Why won’t they listen?” Zuko asks one day with his head in his hands, his fists clenched in his hair as his advisors look to one another wearily and wish there was a better explanation for them to give. Taking a deep breath, Aang says something about people needing time to learn to open their hearts, and Katara says something about needing to take a harder line approach with their new trade regulations, and Sokka almost says something about that time, do you remember, back when we were kids, when we needed to learn to adapt to new cultures, new rules and expectations on the fly, whenever we moved into a new region or a new town, it’s not that hard, except then he remembers that they grew up too fast, the four of them, in a way no one should ever be forced to do, and he says this instead:

“Let’s start somewhere else.”

Zuko doesn’t take his hands out of his hair. Toph snorts loudly.

“In case you forgot about this part of the plan, Sokka, we _need_ the Fire Nation jurisdictions to acknowledge the independence of the Earth Kingdom colonies in order for them to, you know, _be independent._ ”

“I know that,” Sokka says. “But the administrative districts aren’t going to listen to us no matter how many times we tell them they have to, and the last thing we want right now is any kind of violent uprising. So instead of trying to levy some taxes that they’re not going to pay, or disrupt their supply lines and hurt a bunch of innocent civilians, why not go over their heads? Zuko has legislative authority over all the Fire Nation properties, including the colonies—”

“But there aren’t supposed to _be_ colonies anymore,” Zuko interrupts. “That’s the whole _problem._ ”

Sokka nods slowly. “I know,” he says. “But if they’re not asserting their own independence, and the presiding jurisdictions aren’t granting it to them, why not do it for them? Draft new laws pertaining to Fire Nation colonies acquired in the last hundred years or so, since the start of the war, to integrate them back into the Earth Kingdom infrastructure. Any regulations imposed by any subordinate governing body of the Fire Nation is by default superseded by contradictory Earth Kingdom law, that kind of thing.”

Zuko narrows his eyes, his grip loosening a little as Aang gets that nervous, furrowed look on his face.

“Sokka,” he says, “you can’t just throw these people out of Fire Nation rule and expect them to be able to sustain themselves. And what if they get attacked?”

“Why not just cede control of all the colonies back to the Earth Kingdom?” Katara asks then, tracing her finger in scattered trails across a brightly colored map. “You’d have to meet with Kuei to sort out the details and draw up contracts, but I’m pretty sure he’d be up for it. I mean if nothing else, look at the benefits you’ve got to gain from the cultural integration; you’ve got an Earth Kingdom population basically raised in the Fire Nation, who knows what kind of things they’ll come up with? Art, and social reform, and…all kinds of things, and think about how many more people will be able to find their soulmates when they’re not limiting themselves to people in their own nation!”

Toph hums irately. “Yeah, that’s great, but you think everyone living in those colonies wants to switch to Earth Kingdom rule? Do you have any idea how many of them have been living as Fire Nation citizens their entire lives? You’re talking about completely uprooting entire civilizations.”

That furrowed look on Aang’s face deepens further, and Katara frowns at her map.

“You don’t have to force them,” Sokka says. “It’s not like you’d be closing the borders. Give the towns back to the Earth Kingdom and offer relocation assistance for anyone who wants to move to legitimate Fire Nation territory.”

Zuko leans so far over the table that he’s nearly lying on it. After a little while, he takes his hands out of his hair.

“You’re good at this,” he says.

Sokka smiles.

“Just doing my part.”

Zuko nods.

Aren’t we all.

\---

Sokka still remembers all the legends and the bedtimes stories, the same ones they all know, about the magic of two soulmates coming together, the otherworldly beauty of it. The perfect rightness of another piece of the grand design sliding into place. He remembers lying awake nights with baited breath, waiting to be fit in where he belongs, to find his truth or his purpose or whatever the word is today for that thing no one quite knows how to say out loud.

Sitting at the top of a deeply sloping hill, looking out over the majesty of Caldera and feeling Suki’s hand fit into his, he thinks maybe he shouldn’t have aimed so high.

“Sokka?” Suki says as the sun hits the line of the horizon and flashes bright green. “What are you thinking about?”

He looks over at her and smiles gently.

“I was just thinking about us.”

She smiles back, her eyes going a little blank.

“Yeah.”

You feel it too, huh?

Well. We do the best we can.

\---

Katara and Aang marry on the second anniversary of the day they met, the culmination of two years of trials and tribulations, struggles that came to nothing and those that exceeded their wildest expectations. Everyone expects it, but that doesn’t make the day any less lovely, doesn’t make the couple any less loved.

Dedicated to the restoration effort as they both are, they don’t take much in the way of a honeymoon, but Sokka gives them a good week before he drops by, waiting until Aang is off playing advisor on some archaeological trip to the recently discovered ruins of an old Earth Kingdom city at the bottom of East Lake.

“Sokka,” Katara greets him. “Is everything okay?”

Sokka smiles and closes the door behind him.

“Fine,” he says. “I just wanted to talk.”

She invites him in for tea, and he asks if she has any jasmine.

For you? Always.

They sit on cushions at a low table, and Katara sets a small stone kettle over a flickering blue flame.

“What did you want to talk about?” she asks.

Sokka grasps his knees and leans back in his seat.

“You and Aang,” he says. “How did you know?”

She spoons dried leaves into a shallow dish and smiles to herself.

“It wasn’t right away,” she says. “It’s not what they tell you it’ll be, your eyes meeting and a spark lighting up in your heart, that warm feeling all through your body. Or it wasn’t for me, anyway, but afterwards, once we’d been together for a while… It’s not something you can understand with words.” Her smiles widens for a second, then drifts away with her thoughts.

“Calmness, I guess,” she says. “Like…quietude, inside me. In my spirit. When I’m with him, I feel like I’ve gotten to the place I’m supposed to be.”

He nods, stashing her words away in the back of his mind.

“So you’re sure you are?” he asks. “You’re sure it’s him?”

She looks up at him tenderly, underneath the surface the way only a sister can.

“Is this about Suki?”

He shakes his head; maybe, maybe not. Yes and no, if and then.

“She’s not mine,” he says. “We’re not. We both know it.”

She hums softly and finishes preparing the tea.

“So you want to break up with her?”

He sighs. “No. I don’t know, maybe.”

“Do you love her?”

Is that all that matters?

He frowns down at his hands. “I mean, I do,” he says, “and I know she loves me too, but… We’ve been spending so much time apart lately; I only really see her when I go to see Zuko, it’s all…circumstantial. Our lives apart are bigger than our life together.”

She hums again, pouring a cup and pushing it his way. He fits his hand around it, the warmth seeping into his skin, and holds it close.

“I think we’ve been telling ourselves that we’re something we’re not because things would be easier if it was true.”

Tendrils of steam rise from their cups, from the spout of the teapot, vanishing into the air. They’re the same shape as flickering flames, if he looks closely; a little slower, a little softer, but cast from the same mold.

“Would it be the worst thing?” she asks. “The two of you together, even though you’re not soulmates. Do you love each other enough to try?”

He laughs sharply, through his teeth.

“You always were the romantic one.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

He raises the tea to his lips with a grin.

“Nope.”

\---

There is an invisible place that exists between truth and lies, a miasmal land of uncertainty where questions are answered a hundred times in a hundred ways, every one of them as right as it is wrong. Everything we know is challenged, everything we thought a certainty has a hundred facets built into each of a hundred different sides. No one knows what the hell they’re doing and everyone cries out loud that they’ve done everything they could.

The world in peacetime has so much more grey than the world at war, when everyone is asking forgiveness for the things they’ve done. I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know. Please give me another chance, I swear I’ll do it right this time.

Zuko does his best.

“We can begin a new era of love, and peace,” he says. We can stitch up those wounds, we can salve those scars, we can start on down that road and ask each other not to look back. We can preach forgiveness and apologize for our part and pay for all those gravestones, and hand out umbrellas for anyone who wants to go and visit on a rainy day.

Are we making a difference yet?

We try so hard. We mark ourselves different, we stand up tall and say that we know better, than we _are_ better, that we’ve learned from our mistakes and everyone else’s and this time won’t be like you think it will, it won’t be like you remember.

“I didn’t think it was going to be easy,” Zuko says one night, sitting at the head of the table long after the rest of them have gone, long after they’ve listed their demands and rescinded their concessions and argued each other down to nothing. “But I didn’t think it would be…this bad.”

Sokka folds his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair.

That’s the thing about you and me, isn’t it? Don’t you think? Your tragedies are the same as mine, but still so different. Even after everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve seen and everything we’ve done. The pieces at the bottom always come out a little crooked when we try to match them up.

“It’s still early,” Sokka says. “Lots of people aren’t ready to give up the lives they built for themselves. They’ve never had to try, maybe they don’t think they can.”

Zuko presses his fists to his eyes and shakes his head.

“But how can I convince them that they can trust me?”

I know it hurts. I know.

Sokka reaches out to grasp his shoulder.

“These things take time,” he says. “Not everyone’s gonna come around, but we’ll figure it out. You’ll get there. We all will, sooner or later.”

Zuko looks up at him with a thin smile on his lips, and Sokka nods. It helps to hear the words out loud, doesn’t it? Even the ones you know are true. And I’ll be here for you, when things get hard and you start to forget.

All we can do is try.

\---

It’s funny, the sorts of things a person can get used to. It’s funny, the sorts of things that become routine. How fast a man stops being surprised by things that should keep him up at night, how easily he accepts the lot in life he’s dealt himself.

“So,” Sokka says winningly, “what was it this time?”

Zuko hardly slows his pace as Sokka drapes his arm across his shoulders.

“It’s not funny,” he says. “This is the third one this month.”

“It’s a little funny,” Sokka needles. “Come on, the blind guy who tried to beat you to death with a pipa? What did he think was going to happen?”

“Sokka,” Zuko looks at him askance, “these people are trying to assassinate me.”

“In the most incompetent way possible!”

“Sokka!” Zuko stops short and throws Sokka’s arm off his shoulders. “I am trying to rule over a nation that wants me dead!”

Tell me you understand this terrible thing that’s happening. Tell me you see what I see. I know you’re only trying to help, but tell me you live in the same world that I do.

Sokka goes to set his hand on Zuko’s arm, maybe to curl his fingers around his wrist the way he sometimes does, but pulls back at the last moment as his eyes soften around the edges. This charade can only go on for so long, and we’ve played it out before.

“They don’t,” he says. “You’re changing things, you know that’s hard for people to accept. But it has to happen, and a couple of loose screws don’t speak for all of them.”

Zuko glares at him a moment, not malice so much as exhaustion, the weariness of bearing burdens that won’t go away, stretching for goals, for accomplishments that keep slipping away at the last moment. The taste of victory soured by the twists and turns of life, things that nobody thought to tell him about, to warn him about, and now see fit to blame him for not knowing, for not fixing before they break him.

Zuko glares at him, and he spits through his teeth, a poisoned note as he shakes his head as though this life of his still has the power to shock him, as though any of this can still be counted a surprise.

“Do you want to know what it was this time?”

Sokka smiles, a little bit of light through the veil.

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.” Zuko looks him in the eye. “You did. Okay, well. It was you. Okay? They tried to get to me through you.”

Surprise.

Lacing his fingers behind his head, Sokka leans back a little, that thoughtful expression on his face that he gets when he’s trying to center himself. Zuko shakes his head again.

“I’m putting the people I care about in danger,” he says. “I knew it had to happen sooner or later, but now that it has…”

Am I ready to give myself over to this life? This is all that I am, all that I will ever be. Now and forever.

He takes a step back, turning away, and Sokka does grab his wrist this time.

“Wait,” he says, “I feel like I should be apologizing to _you._ ”

Zuko frowns. “What do you mean?”

“You know,” Sokka gestures at himself with his free hand, “another target. To be honest with you, I could probably be putting a little more effort into, like, looking out for my own safety. I do have a pretty bad habit of eating whatever somebody puts on my plate.”

“Sokka…”

“No, no, I need to be more responsible.” Sokka drops his grip to raise both his hands in a supplicating gesture Zuko hasn’t seen on him since they were teenagers, a little bit patronizing and a little bit endearing. “It’s fine, I can be a rules-and-decorum kind of guy.”

Laughing tersely, Zuko turns away again.

“Right.”

“Hey.” Sokka reaches for his hand again, clasping it tight. “It’s okay. Like you said, this kind of thing happens to people like us. Whatever it was, your guards caught it in time, and better they come after me than some little kid who doesn’t know how to defend themselves, right?”

Better none at all, but what world sees that as a possibility? None I’ve ever known.

Zuko clicks his tongue and turns away again, but he lets Sokka keep his grip.

“Is that why you hang around?” he says blithely. “You like putting yourself in harm’s way?”

Sokka smiles a private little smile. “You’re that worried about me?”

Scoffing loudly, Zuko pulls his hand back and starts to walk away, but Sokka steps forward to grab him again.

“No, hey,” he says. “I’m sorry. You’re right, this is serious. But it’s pretty late, right? Everybody’s gone home, there’s nothing you can do right now. Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow.”

Let’s hide all our problems away for tonight. Let’s put them somewhere cold and dark in the back of our minds and pretend the lives we live are something to be envied.

Zuko jostles his arm apathetically and lets Sokka pull him down the hall, down a path he’s mapped a hundred times before on a hundred different days, a hundred different ways, emerging into the night, the muted glow of the lamps shining through the paper shades casting the turtle duck pond a haunted sort of color that slips between gold and grey with every shift of the rippling water.

Zuko smiles at the peace this place always brings him, memories tinged with nostalgia, the dark parts blotted out by the soothing balm of passing time.

Sokka sits on the grass, and Zuko sits beside him, leaning against the stone bench at his back. The evening air is sweet and warm, and they breathe in the scent of the water and the grass, the honeysuckle and the night-blooming jasmine.

“I never did things the way I was supposed to.”

Sokka hums softly, and Zuko tips his head back onto the seat of the bench, even though it hurts his neck a little.

Always a little to the side.

“I wasn’t a natural firebender. I mean, you know that.”

“You’ve made up for it pretty well.”

Zuko tsks at the side of his mouth.

“Because the dragons taught me how. I wasn’t a natural at firebending the way my father did it, as a show of force. He didn’t know how to do it any other way, I don’t know that he even knew there _was_ another way.”

Sokka looks over at him, bracing his arms behind him and leaning back, and Zuko bites his tongue.

“All I wanted was to fit in,” he says. “All I wanted was to be able to do the things that were expected of me. I thought my life was all planned, all laid out, ready to go, and I wanted to follow that plan so badly. And then everything changed, and I tried to change along with it, and I thought that would be enough.”

Sokka shifts his arms and sits up again, leaning forward over his lap.

“Yeah,” he says. “I get it.”

We live, we learn, we grow. We break in places we didn’t know we could, we fix ourselves along the way.

“And now I’m in charge,” Zuko says to the sky. “Now it’s all me, making that plan, figuring out which expectations I should follow and which ones don’t matter.”

It’s all me, fielding that blame. Standing out on the front lines, taking all those hits, doing all I can to keep myself upright so that everyone else can stand tall beside me.

“You know we’re here for you,” Sokka says. “All of us. Me and Katara, and Aang, and Toph, and Suki, and everyone. You’re not alone.”

Zuko lowers his head and reaches to massage his neck, the point of connection between his skull and his spine.

“I know.”

The jasmine bites into the air, a bitter tang laced through the breeze.

Zuko presses his hands against his knees.

“Sometimes I think I’m not meant for this.”

Sokka looks at him again. “Says who?”

“No one.” Zuko folds his arms in his lap. “But sometimes I think the Fire Nation deserves the sort of leader they can understand, someone who does what he’s supposed to. Somebody who’s followed the path he was set on.”

“That didn’t work out too well for the rest of your family.”

It didn’t, did it? It so rarely does, when you think about it. When we’re not making our own choices, picking our own battles and making our own mistakes, that’s when we get ourselves into the kind of trouble that’s hard to get out of.

“If it helps,” Sokka says, “think about how much better it’ll be for the Fire Lord after you, that you’ve fought so hard and done so much to make the world better. To make the Fire Nation better, to clean up the mess you were left with and set the kind of precedent you’re setting, where someone can rule the way they want instead of the way history told them they had to.”

“Here’s hoping my heir isn’t a psychotic megalomaniac.”

Sokka raises his arm in an imaginary toast. “To the future.”

Zuko chuckles into his chest, and Sokka sighs, lowering his arm back down.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve been waiting my entire life for the universe to give me some kind of purpose.”

“Hm?”

Sokka smiles. This is all so silly, isn’t it? The things we tell ourselves that can’t possibly be true, the promises we make that we’ll never follow through. The lives we think we want because that’s how things are, because that’s the way they’ve always been.

“I mean,” Sokka shrugs, “I was basically the only boy left at the Southern Water Tribe when all of our men went off to war, I always kind of figured I’d find my soulmate, settle down to lead the tribe into…whatever was going to happen. Shoring up the battlements, I guess. Trying to mount a resistance that probably would’ve failed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Don’t I?”

Zuko threads his fingers through the hair at the back of his head, that spot he still remembers the boomerang hitting him so many years ago, back at the start of all this. Back when they were so brazen, so careless and so bold.

“Maybe.”

They both laugh softly, wispy sounds to fill the silence. Zuko takes a deep breath and looks out over the water.

“What happened?”

Sokka picks at the grass.

“Well, Katara’s running the tribe, obviously, so that didn’t go exactly how I expected. And after everything that happened, all the people we met and all the things we saw…” He rolls his shoulders, forward and then back. “I don’t know, I guess finding my soulmate doesn’t seem that important anymore. I’m not so interested in whatever place the universe has set out for me as I am in the one I make for myself, you know?”

I think you do. You’ve learned it the hardest way you can, and you know it well. Fitting into the world of outcasts, you understand the life I’ve chosen for myself.

Zuko leans into the grass and lowers his gaze.

“You don’t feel bad for them?”

“Huh.” Sokka narrows his eyes up at the sky. “I guess I never really thought about it, but…I bet they’ll be all right. If they want to come looking for me, I’m not going to run away, but I’m not going to give up the life I have to chase after some dreams I’ve been fed all my life that aren’t really mine.”

All the things I’ve won, the things I’ve lost, everything I have is mine to own. Everything I am is mine alone.

Zuko rubs at the arch of his cheekbone, closing his eyes a moment.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I ever found my soulmate,” he says. The words sound funny out loud, forbidden in some kind of secret way, and it’s no wonder that he’s never said them before. Sokka only looks at him patiently, calmly and without criticism, and Zuko smiles with just the corner of his mouth.

“Not that I don’t want one,” he says. “I think. But if I did, if I met them, and falling in love was another thing that I was supposed to do, another expectation I was supposed to live up to, I…” He breathes a hollow laugh. “I don’t know. I guess I’d be afraid I was doing it for the wrong reasons.”

After everything, after all of this, you make it look so easy. Being a good and kind man, being a strong and righteous man, even when the world is hard to face, when other people are hard to love, you do it without even thinking. Without even knowing.

Sokka reaches out for his hand, taking it as they both look other places.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I think you’re doing great.”

Zuko threads their fingers together, breathing in the honeysuckle and sighing softly.

“It’s worth plenty.”

From someone who’s been here for so long, who’s endured so much and been so strong. From someone who can say it honestly, from someone who would, it’s worth just enough.

Sokka raises their laced hands, pressing them gently to his lips.

“Thank you,” he says. “For being you.”

Zuko smiles.

To the boys we were, and the men we’ve become.

To the choices we’ll make tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> “You must be proud.”  
> “So proud…and sad.”  
> —Sokka and Arnook, “The Siege of the North, Part 2” (s01e20)
> 
> “Sokka, it’s good to see you!”  
> —Suki, “The Serpent’s Pass” (s02e12)
> 
> “Look, I know you’re just trying to help, but I can take care of myself.”  
> —Suki, “The Serpent’s Pass”
> 
> “Hey, I heard you guys flying around down there, so, I just thought I’d wait for you here. I know you must be surprised to see me here.”  
> “Not really, since you’ve followed us all over the world.”  
> —Zuko and Sokka, “The Western Air Temple” (s03e12)
> 
> “I think you are supposed to be my firebending teacher. When I first tried to learn firebending, I burned Katara, and after that, I never wanted to firebend again. But now I know you understand how easy it is to hurt the people you love. I’d like you to teach me.”  
> “Thank you. I’m so happy you've accepted me into your group.”  
> “Not so fast. I still have to ask my friends if it’s okay with them.”  
> —Aang and Zuko, “The Western Air Temple”
> 
> “Go ahead and let him join. It’ll give me plenty of time to get back at him for burning my feet.”  
> “Sokka?”  
> “Hey, all I want is to defeat the Fire Lord. If you think this is the way to do it, then, I’m all for it.”  
> “Katara?”  
> “I’ll go along with whatever you think is right.”  
> —Toph, Aang, Sokka, and Katara, “The Western Air Temple”
> 
> “When the invasion plan failed, some of our troops were taken. I just want to know where they might be.”  
> “I can’t tell you.”  
> “What? Why not?”  
> “Trust me. Knowing would just make you feel worse.”  
> “It’s my dad. He was captured too. I need to know what I put him through.”  
> —Sokka and Zuko, “The Boiling Rock, Part 1” (s03e14)
> 
> “My guess is, they were taken to the Boiling Rock.”  
> “What’s that?”  
> “The highest security prison in the Fire Nation. It’s on an island in the middle of a boiling lake. It’s inescapable.”  
> —Zuko and Sokka, “The Boiling Rock, Part 1”
> 
> “Listen, I asked around the lounge. There are no Water Tribe prisoners. I’m afraid your father’s not here.”  
> “What? Are you sure, did you double check?”  
> “Yeah, I’m sure.”  
> —Zuko and Sokka, “The Boiling Rock, Part 1”
> 
> “I promised my uncle that I would restore the honor of the Fire Nation. And I will. The road ahead of us is challenging. A hundred years of fighting has left the world scarred and divided. But with the Avatar’s help, we can get it back on the right path and begin a new era of love and peace.”  
> —Zuko, “Sozin’s Comet, Part 4”
> 
> The blind guy who tried to beat Zuko to death with a pipa is inspired by Gao Jianli, the blinded ex-assassin-cum-lutist who tried (and failed) to beat Emperor Qin Shi Huang (18 February 259 BC – 10 September 210 BC) to death with his lute.


End file.
